


most wandering backdoor heart

by tin_girl



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon Compliant, Draco is obsessed with windmills and it has nothing to do with Don Quixote, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Healing, M/M, Minor Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Neville has a flower shop, Not Epilogue Compliant, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, and i don't mean that draco is a minor i just mean that it's a background relationship, only neither old nor married, people trying to be good, they're the old married couple drarry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:54:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23620066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl
Summary: A solitary, weedy thing, so alone that he never seemed to notice it himself, not only seeing Thestrals but scratching them, too, his arm raised, fingers moving like a tickle, touching air. The way he would smooth his hands down an animal’s body, cup its head to have it look him in the eye – Neville would watch him do it in class and would almost see the Thestrals himself, the shape drawn by Nott’s fingers hanging in the air, suspended, and imprinted on the inside of Neville’s eyelids whenever he blinked.Or, Neville sells flowers, Nott buys them, and the Lost City of Atlantis won't be found.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Hermione Granger/Luna Lovegood, Neville Longbottom/Theodore Nott
Comments: 32
Kudos: 60





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this story is from Ira Cohen's 'Atlantis Express,' which I highly recommend.

I want a new

language. One with at least

50 words for grief

and 50 words for love, so I can offer

them to the living

who mourn the dead.

~ Casandra Lopez, _A New Language_

Neville first sees Theodore Nott after the war when Nott stops by Neville’s shop, opening the door so gently that the bell hung over it stutters, almost doesn’t ring.

Nott is still tall, veiny, and sad-eyed, just like in Hogwarts. Unlike in Hogwarts, he’s wearing a Muggle coat, something black and too thin for the weather. He looks like a vulture, if vultures cried, even though he’s not crying.

Neville is terrible at small talk, but stammers through it, always, no matter who walks in – Ginny, even though they’re friends and past small talk, a house elf on an errand, even though they’re always in too much of a hurry to discuss the weather and celebrities’ pregnancy scares, and, even, on one memorable occasion, Narcissa Malfoy.

(They had an illuminating conversation about tea infusers, him and Mrs. Malfoy).

Neville was raised to engage in polite small talk, nevermind that he’s shite at it, and Nott’s visit isn’t an exception.

“H-hello, how do you do,” Neville says, squaring his shoulders, realizes it might come off as him trying to be imposing, lets them drop. “Sure is cold outside.”

Awkward silence ensues, and it takes Nott an embarrassing half a minute to glance at Neville, as if he didn’t realize that Neville was talking to him.

There’s no one else in the shop, and Nott has been staring at roses. Neville imagines that he must be in love, a dinner date with someone charming scheduled for the evening.

“I haven’t noticed,” Nott says, almost too quiet to catch. “I’m sorry for intruding.”

Neville laughs, awkward, can’t tell if Nott is serious. It’s a _shop_ , for Merlin’s sake—

Neville first noticed the local on his way to Auror training a couple of months back, the inside demolished and a ‘for sail’ sign glued crooked to the window. It was that ‘for sail’ that stuck out in his mind, a spelling mistake he’d make himself at eleven, scribbling essays on his knee, blotches of ink all over the paper, his fingers, his nose. He didn’t have enough to buy the place, but Harry chipped in, and Neville has been paying him back in small instalments ever since the flower shop’s opening a few weeks ago.

Business has been wonderful, courtesy of one Luna Lovegood singing its praises in each of The Quibbler issues since the opening, and in a few before that. The Quibbler, surprisingly, or not, became quite popular after the war, when no one quite dared trust the ‘real’ press for a while and people preferred solving crosswords about flying mules, or whatever it was the Lovegoods hadn’t yet discovered at the time but soon would.

(Neville penned a letter to Luna about it a few days back, _it’s fine, you don’t have to, are you watering that cactus I gave you? It does need to be watered, you know, at least once a month. Oh, I suppose Hermione must water it, even if you’re not._ He tore it to shreds to keep himself from posting it, and ate half of the scraps).

“No, no,” Neville says now hurriedly, managing to catch a book about to fall off the till, and then dropping it, anyway. “You’re not intruding! It’s a pleasure, really— How have you been?”

Nott blinks at him, face devoid of expression, and Neville tries to remember if they ever talked at school. Nott was always one of the quietest kids in class, and Neville remembers someone laughing at him in sing-song voice when they were eleven, _Theodore Nott, he speaketh not_ , how Neville hissed in a whisper loud enough to carry, considering the dungeons’ theatre-worthy acoustics, _it’s not his fault that he’s mute._

They laughed at him, later, for having thought that.

“I’ve… been,” Nott says, fingers twitching like he’s about to wave his hand, only he never does. “Is everything for sale?”

He looks Neville in the eyes so intently that Neville is almost certain he must actually be staring at his forehead.

“Well, I mean, all the flowers are, sure.”

Nott hums as way of acknowledgement, but there’s something robotic about the sound.

“How often do you get deliveries?”

Neville scratches his neck, puzzled.

“Whenever I need them, really. It’s still a bit informal, and I get everything delivered by a friend, anyhow— Say, can I help you?”

Nott has been examining the roses again, and he startles, straightens, looks like an underfed bird. A stork, maybe, rather than a vulture.

“I need flowers,” he tells Neville seriously, a determined set to his mouth. Neville surprises himself by laughing.

“You’ve come to the right place, then,” he says, and spreads his hands. “Anything specific? What’s the occasion?”

Nott tugs at his sleeve, stares off into space. Tall as he is, the sleeve is too long – long enough that a fussing mother would roll it up for him, if Nott had one.

Neville knows that he doesn’t, and can’t quite remember how he knows it.

“How do you apologize in flowers?” Nott says at last, staring at Neville – or his forehead – again.

He says it like flowers are a language, the way he’d say, how do you apologize in Spanish?

(Lo siento, Neville knows that much. He can apologize in dozens of languages. He learned to, after the war – there were so many funerals, so many people who had lost someone, wizards from all over).

“That’s a tough one,” he admits, worrying at his thumb. His fingers are a mess of chewed fingernails and bleeding cuticles, and Neville hates that insignificant, everyday worries make him gnaw on his fingers, when war never had. “Tulips can symbolize new beginnings and forgiveness an—”

Nott’s expression twists so suddenly that Neville cuts off, halfway through a word.

“No forgiveness,” Nott says, and, after a second, his face goes back to careful blankness. He looks like something’s been taken from him, and not the way something’s been taken from all of them. Like there’s something essential missing, and like he doesn’t even realize, a hole instead of an organ somewhere and him, lost but none the wiser.

“Lilies, perhaps,” Neville says, the ‘perhaps’ strange on his tongue, something Hermione would suggest he use in an essay instead of ‘maybe’, or maybe she’d say there’s no space for doubts in any good essay either way. “Not apology exactly, but the closest thing.”

Nott buys a bouquet, and hands Neville ten times more money than necessary. Neville scrambles for change, and Nott reaches out, as if to still his wrist, but doesn’t, his hand held out awkwardly between them.

“That’s alright.”

“No, come, now, that’s too much—”

Nott smiles, something that would be sad if it weren’t quite so plastic, and when he leaves, the doorbell doesn’t ring this time, which makes Neville think that it’s almost like he hasn’t really left. He laughs at himself, how absurd, but it’s a hollow sound.

He puts the change away instead of stuffing it back inside the till, in case Nott comes back.

Not that Neville expects him to.

*

Three days later, Nott _is_ back.

Neville doesn’t notice him at first, carrying a stack of boxes loaded full of flowerpots, walking backwards to the front of the shop. He levers the boxes down, wants to accio a knife, realizes he doesn’t know where he put his wand, tears the tape off with his teeth instead.

He only realizes Nott is standing in the middle of the shop, watching him, after he unpacks the first box. He startles, and drops one of the pots, the sound of it shattering at his feet painfully familiar.

“When did you— The bell—” he starts helplessly, glancing at the door. “Ah.”

Like last time, then.

Nott takes out his wand, very slowly, watching Neville carefully, as if he expects Neville to react the way one would to a sudden bomb attack.

“May I?” he asks, pointing at the pieces of the flower pot.

Neville sighs and tilts his head as a yes, and Nott mumbles a spell so quiet that Neville wouldn’t guess it even from the movement of his lips. He watches the pot piece back together, slow and clumsy, like the shards of clay need a moment to figure out where they fit. Once it’s done, the pot looks flawless.

Suddenly, Neville remembers that Nott was there when they were rebuilding Hogwarts, staring at the fallen turrets blankly, piecing the smallest things back together, someone saying ‘leave it, mate’ as he tried to spell a small flower ornament back whole, the castle walls crumbled around them like Hogwarts was but a cardboard box that had been stomped on.

“I didn’t mean to break it,” Nott says, and Neville’s about to say that it’s fine when he frowns, realizes.

“You _didn’t_ ,” he protests, staring at Nott’s hands. They’re white, curled tight around his wand, white and steady. “ _I_ broke it.”

“It was my fault, though,” Nott says, sounding so reasonable about it that Neville feels the urge to step around the counter and shake him.

He doesn’t feel this sort of an urge often.

“Did she like the flowers?” Neville asks to change the subject, remembering too late that Nott never told him the occasion for the flowers, the last time. Neville only assumed, an apology, a girlfriend, something like that.

Nott stares at him, unfazed.

“I have no way of knowing,” he says simply, and Neville imagines him shy and unwilling to impose, leaving the flowers on somebody’s doorstep rather than waiting to hand them over himself. “I need another bouquet.”

Neville stares.

“Alright. Of course. Apology again?”

Nott seems troubled by the question, as if he doesn’t quite know himself.

“Something respectful.”

“Oh, well, I mean, I’d say everything’s respectful, as flowers go, maybe with the exception of the Rafflesia.”

“Rafflesia?”

“It’s the biggest flower in the world, actually,” Neville explains, trying not to sound too excited. “It can grow to be three feet across and it’s a parasitic plant. When in bloom, it emits an odour similar to that of, er, rotting meat—”

He stops abruptly, and feels himself blush to the roots of his hair. He’s gone and done it again, rambling about plants rather than commenting on the weather and—

“Do you sell it here?” Nott asks, curious, and then sniffs. “I can’t smell rotting meat, but I have a bit of a cold—”

Neville laughs and laughs, says, a cold? and offers Nott tea.

“No, no, thank you,” Nott says, strangely earnest, wide-eyed. “I couldn’t possibly.”

“What do you mean, you couldn’t?” Neville asks, baffled. “It’s only tea, nothing fancy. Just your old good Earl Grey with a dash of milk, or not.”

Nott stares at him.

“You might need to order a new delivery,” he says, painfully slowly, like every syllable is hurting his throat. “See, I actually need six bouquets today.”

Neville blinks at him, and then says something very, well, Slytherin.

“Alright, I’ll sell you as many as you want,” he concedes, smiling slyly. “ _If_ you agree to have some tea.”

Ten minutes later, Nott is obediently sipping Earl Grey at the back, coat slung over the back of his chair so that Neville is free to stare at the holes all over it. Nott sure pays well for customer service, for someone with clothes this shabby.

“You don’t have seven girlfriends, do you?” Neville inquires nosily. His grandmother would cuff him on the ear if she heard.

Nott just stares at him, eyes wet, nose rubbed pink.

“Girlfriends?” he repeats, innocently confused, like he’s never heard of the concept before. He slurps the tea, and apologizes after every sip, like he’s aware of the habit but simply can’t help it. He did add milk to it, no sugar, and he cradles the cup with care, as if he doesn’t trust himself not to drop it. He’s too big for the chair, rail-thin but long, a daddy-long-legs of a boy, and it occurs to Neville that he has that misunderstood poet air to him, almost handsome enough to moon over. Neville remembers him across rooms in Hogwarts, those sad, soulful eyes, that shaggy hair, those long fingers, and he wonders why girls never seemed interested even though they giggled whenever Draco walked past, even though Draco was much of the same, only blond and with an upturned nose. He figures it must have been the acne scars, and how Nott would let his hair get greasy sometimes, and how his veins always seemed too close to skin, past romantic and on to disturbing.

He sneezes now, and Neville barely keeps himself from offering him a blanket.

“How about a biscuit?” he says lamely.

Nott shakes his head and runs a finger along the arm of the chair he’s sitting in.

“Oak?” he guesses, and, for a second, Neville can’t stand to look at him. It makes him want to bang his head on the nearest flat surface, how Nott seems so painfully miserable and unaware of it.

“Say, where do you want to take all those bouquets?” Neville asks, politeness be damned, and Nott tilts his head to the side, and tells him, like it was never a secret.

“To the cemetery, of course.”

Neville swallows, throat gone dry.

“Of course,” he echoes weakly. He never knew that Nott had lost so many people in the war.

*

“Well, he _hasn’t_ ,” Draco says later that afternoon, and frowns at Neville across the table. He crumples the newspaper he’s holding, too, like the frown can’t be restricted just to his face. “His father, sure, good riddance. A cousin, too, I think. No one else.”

Draco stubbornly maintains that he hasn’t moved in to 12 Grimmauld Place at all, even though he’s knitted mug sleeves for Harry’s mismatched collection of chipped cups, changed the curtains, and stuffed three wardrobes full of his various robes and bathrobes. He had a doorbell installed, too, one that plays Bach’s _St. Matthew Passion_ if the guest is someone Draco likes, Roxette’s _How Do You Do!_ when it’s someone he doesn’t know, Tchaikovsky’s _Dance of The Swans_ when it’s someone he doesn’t like, and, as Neville once had the chance to observe, Abba’s _Dancing Queen_ when it’s Ron. He didn’t have anything set for himself, because, allegedly, Harry had made him a copy of the key after their third official date.

Neville was, as always, reluctantly pleased to hear Bach echoing inside when he rang the doorbell not half an hour ago.

“His mother,” he says now, taking a sip of his coffee, black, just like Draco likes it, and oversugared, just like Harry likes it. He remembers that Nott could see Thestrals long before the war, long before all the rest of them would be able to.

“Well, when he was small, but yes,” Draco admits, nodding his head and trying to uncrumple the newspaper. Hermione is smiling at Neville from the front page, flushed. When Neville stopped by, Draco was in the middle of reading the interview with her, making a ‘ha!’ sound whenever he stumbled across something that ‘Granger would never say if it wasn’t for publicity, have you heard her talk about late-stage capitalism? They censored the swear words, they _must_ have.’ Harry is in the habit of standing behind Draco’s chair whenever Neville comes by and making faces, exaggerating Draco’s gestures and crooking his fingers behind Draco’s head like horns before a photograph. Whenever he does it, Draco sighs like he knows, but doesn’t ever comment on it, as if he’d rather indulge him.

“Friends, maybe?” Harry says now, and Draco snorts.

“Nott? Friends? I was his best friend in Hogwarts and we only shared about five sentences before fifth year.”

“Six bouquets is a bit much,” Harry admits, scratching the back of his neck.

“Seven,” Neville corrects.

“Right. Sorry. Seven.”

“Have you talked to him at all since the war?” Neville asks Draco, and Draco frowns, crumples the newspaper again.

“I have, a few times. Well, I tried, anyway. Pansy has, too, but Nott – he’s always been hard to reach, even when you’re sitting right next to him.”

Neville nods. He got that impression, too, Nott there, but elsewhere, looking Neville in the eyes, but not, talking to him, but having some other, more important conversation in his head.

A solitary, weedy thing, so alone that he never seemed to notice it himself, not only seeing Thestrals but scratching them, too, his arm raised, fingers moving like a tickle, touching air. The way he would smooth his hands down an animal’s body, cup its head to have it look him in the eye – Neville would watch him do it in class and would almost see the Thestrals himself, the shape drawn by Nott’s fingers hanging in the air, suspended, and imprinted on the inside of Neville’s eyelids whenever he blinked.

“Some people, you invite them over for tea, they accept right away,” Draco says, stretching his legs under the table so that his socked feet bump into Neville’s shoes. Neville couldn’t say when they became quite this comfortable with each other, or when exactly he deserved Bach. “Others, they will refuse once, out of politeness, no, no, I couldn’t possibly, you must be so busy. Now, _Nott_ , he’ll keep refusing and refusing, and Merlin only knows if it’s because he doesn’t want to impose or because he doesn’t want to see a single soul.”

“So what should I do, then?” Neville asks, helpless.

“You Gryffindors,” Draco snorts. “Why should you do anything? And how do you know he’ll be back, for that matter?”

Neville smiles, sheepish. He doesn’t.

“Look,” he says, dumping even more sugar in his coffee. “It just feels like something’s wrong, alright?”

“What do you care?” Draco sighs, and it’s less of a _it’s none of your business_ , and more of a _it’s not worth fretting over_.

He’s glad Draco doesn’t explicitly say it, because then Neville would have to disagree with him.

“Nott’s always been strange,” Draco says, leaning back in his chair. Harry stops making faces and puts his hands on his shoulders, digs his fingers into the muscle there, though ‘muscle’ is a bit of a stretch – Draco has always been all bones. “And these past few— Everyone’s a bit off now, you know. He should go see a therapist, the way he’s acting, not— Just let him be, alright?”

Neville doesn’t point out that Draco should consider therapy himself, but won’t, and he doesn’t remind him of how he went missing in the countryside after the war, looking for his mother even though she’d been buried, even though Draco had attended the funeral. Story goes, Harry found him like that in the middle of a storm and took him to see windmills. Now, Draco keeps stacks of books about the things all over the house, and gifts them to people any chance he gets. Neville himself got a windmill encyclopaedia for his birthday. He’s using it as a doorstop.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that, all I’m saying is people are not like rosebushes, you can’t wrap them in a sheet against the wind and expect them to survive winter—”

“I don’t want Nott to survive winter,” Neville says quietly. “It’s March. He already has.”

“Maybe he hasn’t,” Draco says, arching an eyebrow. “Maybe he has frostbite on his brain.”

Harry swats him on the ear, playful.

“Be nice,” he scolds.

Neville sighs, and gets up to leave. He bumps into Ron on his way out, _young and sweet, only seventeen_ , except none of them are, not anymore.

*

The next day, Neville sees Nott pace in front of the shop, back and forth, back and forth. When he stops at last, it’s to helplessly look up at the sign over the door. He stands there for a moment, coat unbuttoned and hair like he hasn’t touched a comb in a week, and then walks in.

The bell stays quiet, and Neville says hello.

“How long do they stay alive?” Nott asks. Then, “Hello. I mean the flowers.”

“I figured,” Neville says, amused. “They’re not really alive, you know, after you cut them.”

Nott stares.

“Well, if I’d known they were cemetery flowers— I spell them, sometimes. How long they stay fresh depends on how often you visit the grave, if I do.”

“Oh,” Nott says, so childishly surprised that Neville can’t help but smile. “That’s smart. How come you’re selling flowers? I thought you were supposed to be saving the world.”

“The world doesn’t need saving anymore, does it?” Neville says, and Nott smiles sadly, like he disagrees, but won’t discuss it. “I like plants.”

It’s as simple as that, always has been. A few weeks back, someone from The Prophet came down here to interview him, scrutinising the then-dusty shelves and pulling on his tie as if he couldn’t stand the humidity. The reporter tried to spin it dramatic, said, are you refurbishing this place as a metaphor for the aftermath of war? Are the flowers meant to be a symbol of new life?

Neville refused to be interesting, told the reporter that he’d always liked herbology, and stifled a laugh when one of his newly delivered flytraps caught on the man’s finger until he yelped with pain.

“Do you talk to them?” Nott asks.

“Pardon?”

“The flowers.”

“Oh.” Neville rubs the nape of his neck, abashed. “Sometimes, yeah.”

“Do they listen? I mean, if I buy a bouquet, leave it at a grave, and tell it to hold off the wilting for three days, promise to be back by then, will the flowers listen?”

Neville sighs, steers Nott to the back, tells him to sit down, waves his wand at the old kettle he keeps there.

“Why on Earth do you not wear a scarf if you’ve got a cold, hmm?” he scolds quietly. “I bet you have a fever.”

“Irrelevant,” Nott says, automatic, and Neville doesn’t throw his hands up in the air, because it’s too much of a Draco gesture, and he refuses to do anything that would suggest that Draco’s rubbing off on him. He takes Nott in – worn shoes, cheekbones like steak knives, a glistening trail below his nose like he doesn’t have tissues – and decides that he should be locked up at the Burrow for a few days, where Mrs. Weasley would force-feed him soup, immobilize him with a pile of patchwork blankets, and knit him a jumper. A turtleneck, even.

“Look, I know that it’s none of my business but I— I think you should talk to someone.”

Nott blinks up at him, and then smiles. It’s oblivious, but less robotic than all the other times he’s smiled, and Neville is so startled when the kettle starts screeching that he jumps.

“I talk to all sorts of people,” Nott tells him once Neville’s done making tea.

“Like who?”

“Dead people.”

The tea sloshes, spills. Neville curses, burns himself, stares when Nott grabs a dishwash and awkwardly pats his hand with it.

“Theodore,” he sighs, reminding himself that he was sorted into Gryffindor for a reason. Probably. Maybe. “What’s all this flower business about?”

Nott frowns at the reddened skin on Neville’s wrist, and Neville snatches his hand back. No one has— his grandmother— Luna—

“I could show you,” Nott tells him, serious. “But you must have other things to do.”

Neville insists that he doesn’t. He has to insist ten times for Nott to believe him, or at least let him tag along. He still looks doubtful, especially when Neville flips the store sign to ‘closed’ quarter to five. Neville politely asks him to button up his coat, and when Nott refuses to, Neville tells him that he’ll force him to wear Neville’s scarf if he doesn’t. Nott seems to consider the prospect such a great offense that he agrees, buttons up the coat, misses one hole. Neville doesn’t have the heart to point it out.

Nott says he usually takes a train, then a bus, but he mumbles something about not wanting to waste more of Neville’s time than strictly necessary and apparates them there, holding onto Neville’s arm so gently that Neville barely feels it through the sleeve of his winter coat.

The cemetery is a disturbing sight, even though it’s surrounded by hills and bathed in mercilessly gold sunlight. It’s full of old, crumbling tombstones, newer ones stuffed awkwardly between them, and barely enough space to squeeze through. Neville stares at the contrast between paler and darker stone, like a set of teeth with many new fillings, and feels an old, weary ache in his heart.

Once, before people started dying left and right, falling limp like a perfect domino show, Neville was a bit scared of Luna Lovegood, this mysterious girl who could see Thestrals and would talk to them, too.

Later, he could see Thestrals himself, and was scared of Luna, anyway.

Hermione wasn’t.

Hermione wasn’t, and Neville hasn’t been to a cemetery in months, because the last time he went—

“Who’s that, then?” Neville asks when Nott lays the bouquet next to one of the newer tombstones.

“I’m not sure,” Nott says. “She died during the war. My father— She was one of my father’s victims.”

Neville sighs, understands.

“Is that what you’ve been doing?”

Nott doesn’t answer. He doesn’t look like he’s lost somewhere inside his head for once, fully present, fully _there_ , and Neville can’t stand to watch the heartbreak of it.

Neville refuses to insult Nott by telling him that he doesn’t need to do this.

“You’re not much of a Slytherin, are you,” he says instead.

“I’m plenty evil, trust me,” Nott says with a bitter note to it, and Neville opens his mouth, stutters on the very first syllable, tripping over his words in a desperate effort to get it right.

“I didn’t mean – You’re not – Slytherins are not – ”

He remembers and remembers and remembers Nott at school, sitting quietly at his desk, staring out the window even though there was nothing there worth looking at, bothering to hand in his essays only half the time, getting Exceeds Expectations every time, even though McGonagall would tell him that he hadn’t exceeded hers, only deserved better than Acceptable.

“You don’t seem very cunning,” Neville says, feeling stupid.

“I can be cunning,” Nott assures him, cocking his head to the side and staring at Neville with eyes gone dark.

“You don’t seem very ambitious, then.”

“I think I was, before my mother died,” Nott says simply. “I had one ambition, not long after the war started. I could show you— I’m sorry.”

“No, I—” Neville says hurriedly, reaching out to grab Nott by the sleeve, even though Nott hasn’t made a move to leave. He blushes, but doesn’t let go. “You should show me. I have time. I _want_ to see. I want to see, and it’s awfully rude of me, being this nosy, but you’ll forgive me the rudeness and you’ll show me, because you’re polite. Aren’t you?”

They watch each other in silence for a moment, and then Nott sighs, resigned. Aha, Neville thinks, and smiles.

*

As Nott is patting his pockets for the keys to his flat, Neville wonders why he cares so much. He hasn’t been this curious about anyone since— well, since Luna, but then, that was before the war, when things still _could_ be interesting.

Maybe it’s that – a feeling after so many months of growing plants and it not being a metaphor for anything.

“My humble abode,” Nott says, impassive, letting Neville enter first. Neville takes off his shoes, lines them up neatly, and looks around. ‘Humble’ seems like the right word, no entrance hall, the living room with no furniture in it save for one wardrobe, a mattress limp on the floor, no bedframe.

There are stacks of books, too, wobbly like a Jenga game about to go wrong, and newspapers all over, open on photos of young people smiling and waving at the camera. And in the middle of it all – a small, inflatable swimming pool filled to the brim with water. It’s blue and round, like something for kids, placed where you’d usually expect a coffee table.

Neville walks towards the pool, stops, glances over his shoulder. Nott makes a half-gesture with his hand, one Neville chooses to interpret as a go ahead.

There are _things_ inside the pool, shapes distorted by water, all of them the colour of sand.

“My only ambition,” Nott says, crouching next to the pool, still in his coat but sans shoes. “The war started, and I guess I thought it was funny, or good, or something ridiculous like that. I mean, I would tell the house elves to clean my coat whenever I bumped into a Muggle on the street, and— And then people started _dying_ , not like my mother, all those years before, but like it didn’t matter, like— _flies_.”

He has a soothing voice, Nott, one that could be recorded and sold as stress-relief tapes for insomniacs, and it’s strange to hear him talk like this, bitter and about awful things.

“It took me a while to understand how much I hated it – a lot of nightmares, a lot of puking – but once I did understand, I got this idea. I thought that if I found the lost city of Atlantis, everyone would— I thought everyone would forget all about the war, you know?”

Nott lets his hand drop into the water until the hem of his sleeve soaks wet, and shakes his head.

“It’s stupid, I know, but I really thought that if I found Atlantis, people would stop killing each other, that it’d be too big of a thing for everything to go on, unchanged.”

He reaches for something, fishes it out, hands it to Neville. Neville takes it from him, turns it this way and that, lets it drip all over his trousers. It’s a miniature column, ornaments so tiny that he wouldn’t be surprised to learn they were carved with a needle.

“I was wrong, of course, but I still hate myself for never having found it.”

Neville doesn’t say anything, doesn’t put an awkward hand on Nott’s shoulder, doesn’t move.

“Can I....?” he asks after a silence that stretches several minutes long, pointing awkwardly to the pool. Nott nods, and Neville slowly leans over the edge and dunks his head in the pool, blinks, opens his eyes.

The water is cool, Nott’s hand on his back is impersonal but steadying, and the city of Atlantis around him is beautiful like nothing else, ever. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading!! <3 Please, consider leaving a comment if you liked the chapter (or if you didn't and want to tell me so), I live for feedback and need attention :,)


	2. Chapter 2

...how soon grief becomes exhaustion in the March sun

~Beckian Fritz Goldberg, _Mimesis as Part of the Body_

Neville told Luna he loved her approximately three minutes after realizing that he did, an epiphany and almost two hundred seconds of wringing his fingers before he confessed it, feeling like a balloon that had to deflate in order not to burst.

And deflate he did.

“Me? Love?” she repeated with a frown as if she’d misheard him and needed to make sure. “Is that a pun?” she asked carefully, and he laughed like it had been.

“Yes, exactly, a pun!” he said through the laughter, and he sounded like someone in hysterics even to his own ears. She had a necklace made from paper clips, a gift from someone that she would thumb at every now and then with a smile like a watermelon slice skin, and it occurred to Neville that he should have asked who the necklace was from before puking his heart all over her shoes like a kid that couldn’t hold his liquor, only she wasn’t wearing shoes, because they’d taken them again. “Luna Lovegood, I love you because you’re so good!”

Her expression softened – she must have realized.

“I love you, too,” she said simply, the way someone might say, roasted chicken for dinner tonight. Well, Neville suspected she’d be a tad more enthusiastic over roasted chicken. “And like you, I, too, am in love with someone. We should talk about it over juice or wine. Unless you prefer vodka? Do you? We could braid each other’s hair, only yours is too short, and we could watch a film, only electricity.”

Neville blinked at her and then laughed. He couldn’t not to, absurdly fond of her even while she was breaking his heart.

“There’s a war coming,” he reminded her. “No time for wine.”

“Oh,” she said, nodding somberly. “Do you suppose many people will die? We could do milk, instead. Don’t worry, the girl I love doesn’t like me back, either.”

“The… girl. The _girl_ that you like.”

“Yes, I assume so,” Luna said seriously. “If it’s a disguise, it’s a pretty good one.”

He never asked, but it became pretty clear after the war. Luna would think of weird inventions instead of looking for new, maybe-existent species – she would charm combs so that they made whoever used them smile, and would fold them under Hermione’s pillows, Neville letting her into the Gryffindor dormitory while everyone else was at dinner. She would stumble upon Hermione’s unfinished essays, and she would complete the references for her, Hermione too tired to realize later. She would swap the feathers in Hermione’s pillows for wool that was spelled to prevent bad dreams, and she would put four-leaf clovers pressed dry and thin under the insoles of Hermione’s shoes, for luck. Those, she’d pick herself, and wouldn’t let Neville help.

Neville still loved her, and ached, and ached, and ached, but knew that he would never be scared of her again.

Once, she offered to kiss him.

“If it would make you happy,” she said with a shrug, and he considered getting offended, but she sounded very matter-of-fact, and not like she’d be doing it out of pity, so he only refused politely.

A few weeks into the new semester, Hermione found Luna’s shoes, and returned them to her, polished and mended where the leather had been falling apart. Luna checked under her own insoles, looking for something cursed that whoever had stolen the shoes might have put there, but she found dried Canterbury bell flower petals instead.

A week later, she and Hermione were going on long walks, Luna wearing Hermione’s Gryffindor scarf, Hermione wearing Luna’s Ravenclaw one, and Neville and Ron started getting drunk in pubs together.

By the time Nott jerks Neville back by the collar, forcing Neville to resurface, Neville’s had his head underwater for long moments, minutes, forever.

“Theodore,” he croaks, dripping water all over and barely noticing. “ _How_?”

Nott takes the question very literally. He offers Neville a towel, puts the kettle on – no magic – and then settles back down next to him, and reaches inside the pool for another miniature – a rich-looking townhouse with fancy ornaments. It has doors, and windows, and Neville can see the inside of the rooms through them, furniture, people, a baby in a crib.

“The trick is to start with the smallest element, so you don’t get overwhelmed,” Nott explains, carefully detaching the roof of the house and reaching inside to grab a tiny hairbrush between two fingers. “It’s good to have a plan, and to know where you’re going, but you mustn’t let it overwhelm you.”

Wet and enchanted, Neville is overwhelmed alright.

“Do you think that’s what it looks like, then, Atlantis?” he inquires and shakes his head when Nott suggests he hold the townhouse with a tilt of his head. He’s too terrified of crushing it to dust, and can’t imagine either of them would stand the quiet ruin of it, a careful masterpiece turned into a small anthill of a thing.

“No. Atlantis doesn’t exist, does it? This is just what I imagine it’d look like. Not even that. It’s what I’d _want_ it to look like.”

Neville turns his head to stare at him, water dripping off a tendril of his hair and to his nose. The townhouse is hard to look away from, but then, so is Nott.

“Well, I think that you’d want it to look beautiful, then.”

Nott smiles, and Neville almost forgets that he seems half-crazy, stuck inside his own head, short a few marbles and who can say where he lost those? He remembers when he excuses himself to the toilet and finds a filled-up bathtub inside, figurines carved in soap bobbing in the water, miniature Death Eaters, Voldemort, Snape, Harry, Neville himself, too, an inch away from a coil that must be Nagini, and, for some reason, holding a flower rather than a sword.

Neville stares at it for a moment, and then moves the figurines, putting an inconspicuous extra inch of space between himself and the snake.

When he leaves, he can hear Nott talking to someone, only when he joins him in the kitchen, he’s silent and alone.

He drinks the tea, he tries not to stare at the pool, he excuses himself.

Nott seems sad, telling him goodnight, but it’s not like he ever seemed happy before.

“I was a stupid kid,” he tells him while Neville is putting on his coat. “I’m trying to fix it.”

Neville smiles and doesn’t tell him that one can’t fix some things, because although he whole-heartedly believes it, he also believes that Nott shouldn’t have to fix a damn thing.

*

“A genius, eh?” Draco says, trying to shuffle a deck of cards. He drops half of them, and goes on, unbothered, Harry left to crawl under the table and collect them from the ground. “I’m glad my friend has managed to impress you so.”

Neville, feels touched more than he feels impressed, and not touched as in grateful, either, but touched as in had-his-heart-fingered-by-something-and-was-reminded-of-its-uncomfortable-presence-in-his-chest.

He’s at 12 Grimmauld Place for two reasons: Nott hasn’t been to the shop in a week, and Hermione stopped by in the afternoon, sheepish, asking him for some lavender. He smiled at her, she said something about the flat walls being blue, and wouldn’t it match perfectly, to which he said that it was alright, that he knew Luna loved lavender, that he’d be sending it to her every day if it wasn’t inappropriate, that he was happy for them.

Hermione stared at him, and he knew he’d said too much but they both smiled through it like kids told to grin at the dentist’s.

“This calls for wine,” Harry said when he saw Neville on their doorstep, St. Matthew Passion still playing.

“No,” Neville said, and laughed, remembering Luna. “This calls for vodka.”

Draco raised his eyebrow over Harry’s shoulder, wrapped in a bathrobe and with the newest issue of Vogue in hand (“familiarizing myself with Muggle culture, is what I’m doing,” he’d told Ron when Ron dared ask about it once), and offered Firewhisky.

And now here they are.

“You’re going down,” Draco tells him, dealing the cards clumsily, chin held high like he believes he’s doing it expertly.

Neville smiles and remembers dunking his head in Nott’s pool, and all those wonders all around him, how it felt like the bottom of the ocean, and not the middle of a cheap London flat.

“You should go easy on him,” Harry tells Draco, winking at Neville over his head. Whenever Draco loses (which is always, in spite of his many successful cheating attempts) his tactic is to insist that he’s done so on purpose, to let them win, and they’ve found that usually, it’s wise to go along with it. A failure to do so has many a time resulted in insults and cutlery being thrown around the house, and both the tapestry and Neville have scars to show for it.

“Anyway, I can’t stress this enough,” Draco says, examining his cards with a frown. “I wouldn’t worry about Nott. He’s like a cat, you know? He comes and goes, doesn’t need help cleaning himself, and won’t wag his tail when you find him.”

“He doesn’t have a tail.”

“It was an analogy.”

“I feel that you’ve taken it too far.”

“You always think I take things too far.”

“That’s because you _do_. Remember that time you decided to be a Death Eater? That escalated, too.”

“ _Rude_. And after I’ve shared my whisky with you, too!”

*

Neville goes to the cemetery because he’s curious about the flowers. He intends to check on them – if they’re thriving, it’ll be a sign Nott has visited the graves, at least. Not very reassuring, but at least then he’ll know Nott has been _some_ where.

(It did occur to him to try Nott’s flat, but he figured that, although brave, it would be unspeakably rude).

He doesn’t expect to find Nott there, but find him he does, curled up on his side between two graves like a kid trying to cry himself to sleep, only eyes dry and wide open.

“Well, that’s unexpected,” he says, awkward, settling down next to Nott and crossing his legs at the ankle.

“Not from my side, no,” Nott mumbles, staring emptily into space.

“Do you mean me, or yourself?”

“Both.”

“You expected me to come here, then?”

“Well, no, but now that you’re here, it’s not that surprising.”

Neville considers joining Nott in the horizontal position, wondering if it would be disrespectful. They are in a cemetery, after all, and sitting down already feels like enough of a crime.

It doesn’t seem offending, somehow, Nott curled up like that. He looks like he belongs there, only it’s such a morbid thought that Neville decides not to dwell on it.

“How come?” he asks after a moment, and Nott looks up at him at last, something honest about it. For once, it doesn’t feel like he’s looking right past Neville or staring at his forehead.

“You’re _good._ ”

Neville stares at him and doesn’t understand.

“Oh— um, thank you?”

“Spookily so,” Nott complains, frowning at Neville with discontent. “You make it look very effortless.”

“I mean, it doesn’t take too much effort,” Neville says, feeling clumsy and stupid. His coat is second-rate at best, and he doesn’t know why he should feel self-conscious about it when Nott’s clothes are of even worse quality, but suddenly, he does.

“It does, too, and I can only pull it off one-third of the time,” Nott says, going back to staring at nothing, which, Neville suspects, only means that he’s staring at something unpleasant inside his own head. “Every day, I stand in front of my mirror and tell myself: today you’re going to be good, you waste of space. Then I have to remind myself every minute but forget anyway, half the time. The worst is when I just ignore it instead of simply forgetting.”

“You don’t strike me as a particularly bad person,” Neville says, which is an understatement. Still, he feels like saying that Nott strikes him as a good person would be an overstatement, because Neville doesn’t like the whole good-bad dichotomy rhetoric, and Nott mainly strikes him as sad, if anything.

“Neville,” Nott says seriously, the first time he’s really spoken Neville’s name in – well, maybe ever. “I was awful to you in school.”

“You were indifferent to me in school,” Neville corrects, feeling the sudden urge to pet Nott on the head. He shoves his hands into his pockets instead, frowning when he encounters old train tickets stubs, pen caps, and a half-chewed gum that he left there for later once, and then forgot all about. Old sunflower seeds, too.

“I charmed your toad to sing Fleetwood Mac, once,” Nott points out dryly.

“I like Fleetwood Mac. And you probably only bothered to do it because Draco wanted you to. He was way worse, anyway, and we’re good friends, now, me and him.”

(He gave Draco and Harry a cactus when they moved in together, even though Draco stubbornly claimed no one had moved anywhere, because he figured maybe they wouldn’t kill a plant this self-sufficient.)

“Oh? Will we become good friends, too?” Nott says, staring at Neville, eyes boring into his, and suddenly, he’s all Slytherin, a teasing lilt to his voice and some strange hunger in it, like a way to ruin Neville has occurred to him and like he’s just skin wrapped around the excitement of toying with it.

Neville returns the stare and thinks that small reflections of him must be trapped there, inside Nott’s pupils, wonders if it’s scary and cold there, wonders what those reflections might look like.

Then, quite unexpectedly, Nott’s Slytherin eyes fill with tears.

“You really don’t know, do you?” he says, and Neville’s about to ask him what he means when Nott tilts his head forward and thumps it on the edge of a tombstone, on purpose and hard.

*

As he wipes the blood off Nott’s forehead with the only clean piece of cloth at hand – a white sock – Neville refuses to feel embarrassed about the state of his flat, too many plants, too many boxer shorts lying around, too many empty mugs with tea rings inside them, and so what?

“Cosy,” Nott remarks, and it doesn’t sound sarcastic, but then, Neville suspects it wouldn’t even if it was.

“It won’t stop bleeding,” Neville says, inspecting the wound. “Can you hold the sock? I might have a herb for that.”

When he comes back a minute later, dried leaves in hand, Nott is gone. Neville finds him in the bathroom, inspecting the cut, blood trickling to his mouth. Nott licks it off when it gets to his upper lip, unperturbed, and then taps the wound with his finger.

“Cain’s mark,” he states calmly.

“Except Cain didn’t give it to himself on purpose,” Neville says, impatient, and turns Nott around by the shoulder to dab at the wound with some of the leaves. Nott raises his eyebrows at the decisive gesture but Neville is too busy wiping the blood off to explain, which is just as well because he wouldn’t know how anyway.

“Put the rest under your tongue,” he tells Nott, only Nott doesn’t move to take the leaves from him, seemingly dazed. Neville sighs. “Alright, then, open up.”

In the end, Neville has to pry Nott’s mouth open with his fingers, which should be awkward and off-putting, but is only strangely intimate, like a doctor visit when you haven’t prepared for it, except Neville should feel like the doctor, and not like the patient. He places the leaves under Nott’s tongue, feeling warmth, and it’s startling how cold Nott’s skin is in contrast, where Neville’s thumb is grazing it near the collar.

He doesn’t know what his hand is doing there, where Nott’s neck meets his shoulder, but he doesn’t move it, for fear of drawing Nott’s attention to it.

He has to close Nott’s mouth for him, too, like he’s dealing with a five-year-old, except five-years-old don’t have eyes quite so sad.

Later, he has to force Nott to stay put, steal his shoe to keep him from leaving. It doesn’t do much since Nott seems ready to leave without it.

“I shouldn’t be here,” he says, staring at the picture of Augusta Longbottom hung on one of the walls.

(After she was killed in the battle, Luna held Neville as strong as she could, but the embrace felt like water, anyway.)

Neville makes Nott stay by stealing his wallet, too, and has him help cook dinner. Nott is very good in the kitchen, adding wine to meat and sprinkling herbs Neville doesn’t remember having over it, too, only he won’t roll up his sleeves, getting his shirt cuffs dirty.

“The Dark Mark,” he explains patiently when he catches Neville staring one time too many. “I don’t want to offend you.”

“It doesn’t offend me.”

“I don’t want to offend myself, then.”

Neville decides to be disrespectful, and pries a spatula out of Nott’s hands, traps it between his teeth, and rolls up Nott’s sleeves for him.

“There.”

The Dark Mark is not like Draco’s, black, flat, and still. Instead, it seems inflamed, the contours of it raised and scabbed over, too, old scabs, fresh scabs.

“A remainder,” Nott says before Neville can tell him to shut up. “For when it stops hurting.”

Neville gives him back the spatula and wonders if someone’s already invented a spell that would get rid of all the knives in the world.

“I won’t keel over and die if I go home, you know,” Nott tells him, seasoning the meat.

“No, you won’t,” Neville agrees. “But I just might.”

*

Nott stays the night because Neville insists he doesn’t leave until the wound scabs over. Neville makes up the couch for him, but Nott tells him he prefers the carpet, better for the back, thank you.

Neville suspects it’s some form of self-imposed torture, but doesn’t comment on it.

At night, he can hear Nott laugh, cry, and yell, and in the morning, neither of them mentions it. Neville suspects that Nott might not even know, poking at his eggs and frowning when he speaks and sounds hoarse, as if he somehow didn’t expect it after a night of screaming himself quiet.

*

He doesn’t intend to take Nott along, only Nott pays him a visit at the shop soon before closing on a Tuesday, and Neville always goes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Well, ‘pays him a visit’ is a bit of a stretch, but he doesn’t buy flowers this time, only asks about them, so it’s not like he’s planning to head to the cemetery later.

“I’m going to visit my parents after I close up,” Neville tells him, and Nott glances at the door as if he understands it to be a polite ‘go away’. Neville almost smiles, almost fond. “Do you want to tag along?”

Nott blinks at him.

“I don’t deserve to.”

“For goodness’ sake.”

“You’re angry with me.”

“I’m exasperated.”

“Same difference.”

“Shut _up._ ”

Nott does tag along in the end, only when they Apparate to St. Mungo’s, the receptionist won’t let them pass.

“Visiting hours are over, sir,” he tells Neville with a tint of regret in his voice, glancing at Nott with unease. Nott, for his part, is examining his Dark Mark, scratching at scars that weren’t there last Neville saw it, and Neville almost asks him what happened to not wanting to offend people. He knows what this is about, old prejudices and post-war anxiety, knows the receptionist only has the patients’ best interest in mind and hates the man for it, anyway. He’s about to tell the man so much, not about hating him, but about being biased, when Nott puts his elbows on the desk and leans forward.

The receptionist leans back so suddenly that his chair almost tips over. Nott reaches out, lightning-quick, and steadies it for him. He gives the man a charming smile that reminds Neville of how gleeful Slytherins would get right before bullying someone at school. It’s a chess game, and the receptionist won’t knock a single piece off the board.

“Surely, you know this man here?” Nott says in a silky voice, sweet, pleasant, _innocent_.

“Yes, Mr. Longbottom, of course, but I’m afraid—”

“Surely, after visiting his parents here all his life, he knows the visiting hours?”

“Well yes, but today—”

“ _Surely_ , if there was a change in the hospital schedule, people would be notified of it immediately, so that they could change their plans accordingly?”

“I—”

“And after Mr. Longbottom’s many contributions to the war effort, surely you can make an exception, anyhow?” Nott goes on, and Neville stares, open-mouthed. For Nott to use war as an argument— Well. “He’s a busy man, you know, and comes here regularly anyway. Why, he might even have an interview scheduled for this very evening, and you must know that everyone reads those? Probably, you read them yourself, no? We only have so many heroes, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want Mr. Longbottom to be late to that interview of his and have to explain the tardiness?”

Neville hasn’t given an interview in weeks. He hasn’t given a _proper_ one in months.

The receptionist slumps in his chair.

“An interview?” he echoes.

“Well, a hypothetical one,” Nott says, flashing a brilliant smile. “There are so many offers, after all, and all those functions to attend—”

He hasn’t attended a function in months, either.

“Oh, go on then!” the receptionist snaps, waving them off. “Fifteen minutes and no tricks.”

Nott straightens, dusts off his coat.

“Thank you ever so much for your cooperation, sir.”

He walks down the hallway without a backward glance, and Neville is left to scramble after him.

“You can’t possibly know where you’re going,” he says once he catches up, but Nott doesn’t reply until they’ve rounded the corner. Then he stops, and gives Neville a sheepish smile.

“I don’t, no,” he admits. “I just wanted to sell it.”

Neville stares, confused and amazed, and then leads Nott to his parents’ room.

*

After, Neville says he wants fries and drags Nott to a pub before he can say no. It’s a small place, dim, yellow lights, and smokers in small clusters at round tables, jazz music and a cellar smell. They sit at the bar, and Neville orders food and drink right away, feeling tired in his very bones.

(At the hospital, he offered his mother a candy, she gave him back the wrapper, and he placed it in the inside pocket of his coat. Nott stood next to the window, and stared at Neville’s parents like he’d put them in St. Mungo’s himself, until Alice smiled at him, and Frank said something about how that man over there by the window looked like a chimney-sweep, a handsome one, and how their daughter should marry him. Neville refused to wonder if by their daughter Frank meant him, or some new invention of a person.)

Neville eats his portion of fries, and Nott’s, too. His fingers are greasy, and good – this way he won’t be tempted to push hair off Nott’s forehead to examine the scab, or adjust Nott’s lapels, or touch the bruised skin under his eyes.

He’s still tempted.

“You’re awfully quiet,” he comments, downing a beer.

“I’m always awfully quiet.”

“You shouldn’t be. You have a voice made for the radio, all smooth and like melted butter, only wine and coriander.”

“Speak now or forever hold your peace,” Nott says out of nowhere.

“No, don’t do that,” Neville says hurriedly, reaching out to grasp his sleeve. “Don’t hold your peace.”

Nott stares at him with concern.

“You’re out of your mind, do you know that?”

“ _Me_?” Neville says, because so what that he doesn’t shave as often as he should, and so what that he makes eyelash wishes about never having been born, and so what that his orchids wilted and he never noticed. Theodore Nott the nutcase, suddenly all competent and put-together and looking at Neville like Neville is not see-through, even though Neville wants to be. “You’re the one who’s all messed up.”

“Exactly,” Nott agrees, which doesn’t make sense. “I’m bad for you.”

“But you’re not for me,” Neville says, confused. “I’m not eating you like I would a doughnut. You’re just sitting there, and I’m just looking at you.”

“Yes,” Nott says. “Inexplicably.”

“It’s explicable,” Neville assures him. “It’s the cheekbones.”

It’s a lie, of course. It’s really the eyes.

Nott sighs, and then goes quiet, but some new quiet, less sad and more disappointed, which, Neville guesses, feels so uncanny only because Nott doesn’t ever seem to expect things enough to be disappointed.

“Look,” he says, prying the glass of beer from Neville’s hands without letting their fingers brush. “There’s no point. I never found Atlantis in the end.”

(And he told Neville all about it, too, that night at his flat, how the war had been brewing and how he’d walk all over and Apparate places, unfolding maps and standing on cliffs, diving in cold water, trousers and shirt on, almost drowning, searching, never finding a thing.)

“Yes, because it doesn’t exist,” Neville says. “You said so yourself.”

“Precisely,” Nott agrees, and then leans over and kisses Neville, once, chaste, cold. “See?” he says against his lips. “That felt terrible, didn’t it?”

That said, he leaves, and Neville almost falls off his barstool, because it wasn’t terrible, not at all.

He remembers dunking his head in that pool to see Atlantis again and thinks that this too is not unlike resurfacing for breath even though you don't really want to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so much will have to happen in the last chapter, ugh, spontaneous fanfics are a pain. 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading <333


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know that this took me ages, i'm sorry :,)

Look, we are not unspectacular things.

We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more?

~Ada Limón, _Dead Stars_

It’s Hermione who opens the door, approximately two minutes after Neville braves the knocker spelled to proclaim one of “Luna Lovegood’s life maybe-truths for every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, no Tuesdays.”

Today’s maybe-truth is: home is where the scarf you cry into is.

Hermione looks sleep-ruffled, a tomato sauce stain on her jumper, which is really one of Luna’s jumpers, and they have so much small talk in their past, her and Neville.

“Oh, hello,” she says and frowns like she always does when she sees him, some old guilt to it, like she’d spilled hot coffee all over him and like he still has the burn scars. “It’s nice to— Luna’s off tracking something probably non-existent. I can’t remember the name. She said she smelled it when she was walking back from— it sounded a bit like the Oompa-Loompas, the name, you know, Roald Dahl?”

Neville tilts his head, and Hermione blushes.

“Sorry, I’m – Sorry, rambling, I know.”

“Did I wake you up?”

It’s 4 p.m., but he feels bad about it anyway.

“I did fall asleep,” she admits, opening the door to the flat wider. “I was reading some stupid interview with myself in the Prophet, ha. Bored myself to sleep. Want to come in? Luna should be back in— well, eventually.”

Once inside, she offers him tea while Neville takes a look around. He’s never been to the flat before, and he smiles at all the objects the girls have accumulated over the months, the flat a bit mismatched just like the two of them, dreamcatchers and stockings all over, books in wobbly stacks and reds and yellows clashing with lilac and blue. They were faster than Harry and Draco, Luna and Hermione, searching for flats together right after school, circling offers in newspapers, Hermione checking for mould and Luna checking for Nargles. They found one they liked faster than anyone had expected, too in love to be nit-picky.

“We have cranberry and lavender and honeysuckle and— you know what, pick yourself. Luna has more teas than br— _socks_.”

Hermione hands him a bag stuffed full of boxes of tea, and Neville picks one at random.

“I actually came to see you, not Luna,” he says, and Hermione startles, brushes her hair with her fingers, gives an awkward laugh.

“Oh?”

“I met someone,” Neville explains, which is not much of an explanation, and besides not even true. He’d known Nott before, for years, pale skin, a map of veins in plain sight, spread for everyone to read, hands drawing Thestral-shapes in the air.

“ _Oh_ ,” Hermione says, and motions for him to take a seat at the table, takes the one opposite. Neville leans back in his chair, wonders if it’s Luna’s usual seat. There’s an old issue of The Quibbler on the table, a post-it note stuck to the cover, “don’t forget the milk” in slanted handwriting and a drawing of a cow below it in purple ink.

“Anyone I know?” Hermione prompts with a kind smile. She flicks her wand towards the kettle, flicks it again and two mugs fly out of a cupboard. She doesn’t look away from him once, all eyes, all ears.

“It’s someone— they— _he—_ ”

“He…?”

“He,” Neville confirms, and their shoes knock together under the table. It’s awkward but not as awkward as he’d suspect, and he doesn’t move his feet away. “He, Nott. Theo Nott.”

Hermione frowns, stares.

“I bumped into him on Diagon Alley a while back,” she says, doesn’t move her feet away either. They used to be almost-friends, once. “He apologised to me, didn’t explain, and got me a snow globe. I wouldn’t have accepted, only he’d slipped it into my coat pocket and I didn’t find it until I got back home. I could show you— Anyway, how did you— Just, how?”

“Flowers,” Neville explains clumsily. “Atlantis,” he adds, and Hermione’s frown deepens. “Are there flowers underwater, do you think?”

Hermione shrugs, and Luna’s jumper slides off her shoulder. She adjusts it, thumbs the wool, smiles.

“Luna says there are flowers on the moon,” she tells him. “She’s convinced we could see them if we had a telescope big enough. So, did Theo Nott ‘meet you’ too?”

Neville folds his arms across the table, sighs.

“Merlin knows,” he says, and doesn’t touch his lips. “I think he needs— I don’t know how to help him. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

Hermione flicks her wand and their mugs levitate to the table in small jumps, like they’re excited and can’t wait to be used.

“You could just _be_ , you know,” she says and makes a humming sound when Neville raises an eyebrow. “Do you know how I first knew that I liked Luna? Sorry, Neville, I— Is it okay for me to talk about this? I mean, well—”

She looks so _earnest_.

“ _Hermione_ ,” he interrupts, wanting to reach for her hand, bumping his foot against hers under the table instead. “It’s fine. It’s been— I’m sorry. It’s fine now.”

She smiles, wet and grateful, and he remembers her hitting him with _Petrificus Totalus_ to get to the Philosopher’s Stone and understands that what happened with Luna all those years later wasn’t anything like that at all.

“Well, then. It was the shoes, and the chants, and how they kept bullying her. I just couldn’t stand it, you know?” Hermione says, and it was so long ago but she flushes with anger at the mere thought. “All that _bullying_ and I just— for the longest time, I couldn’t stand her myself but later, I just wanted them to stop, wanted to fix it all for her. I read— I read Muggle psychology articles on bullying, and I even bought one of those parent guides… A _parent_ guide, can you believe?”

She shakes her head, and Neville laughs, scalds his tongue with the tea which tastes like mud and toothpaste, and it’s like old times.

“So I retrieved her shoes, threatened half the Slytherins with made-up spells that sounded complicated enough and Latin enough that they listened. I kept doing it, too, defending her every chance I got, and the irony! It took me three months to realize that she was doing the exact same thing.”

“What do you mean ‘the exact same thing’?”

“They hated me too, didn’t they?” Hermione says, wrapping her hands around her mug with a sheepish smile. “My blood, my mouth, my everything. Insults, stolen books, all that. She was taking care of half of it behind my back herself.”

Neville knows, he was there. He thought Hermione had known, too.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that sometimes people are stronger than we give them credit for, and that help goes both ways, and that I like planning trips and Horcrux-hunting and all that to the smallest detail but I’ve learned that it doesn’t quite work like that with lo— with how sometimes you meet someone.”

She smiles at him, and it’s answer enough – more than Neville came here for – but he stays till late evening anyway, tea refills and catching up, small talk that suddenly feels so very big.

*

After much deliberation, Neville chooses honeysuckle, for devoted affection, and for luck. He wraps the flowers and ties them with a white ribbon, smiles.

Not a traditional bouquet that, the petals not smooth, not full, but he thinks Nott will appreciate it all the more for it.

That is, if he’ll appreciate it at all.

Neville walks to where Nott lives and wonders if his father had done this once, before everything went _crucio_ , before Neville was so much as a thought. He regrets never having done it for Luna because it wouldn’t have changed a thing, but she would have kept the flowers long as she could.

He’s glad to be doing it now.

He’s going to give Nott the flowers, and he’s going to tell him that kissing him wasn’t terrible, and he’s going to survive himself.

These past few months, saying “hello, how do you do” to people he’d seen covered in blood and streaked with grief, telling himself he was a cactus and would survive the lack of water and the lack of love, apologising whenever he spilled something even though there was no longer anyone to apologise to—

Once, he carefully tore a picture of his grandmother to shreds and ate it, piece after piece, because there had still been Death Eaters at large and what if they were going to come and take it?

Hours later, he stared at the empty Firewhisky bottle, understood what he’d done, understood that no one cared about some stupid photo— He almost threw the picture up.

Now, he knocks and knocks, calls Nott’s name, imagines the calm of mock-Atlantis inside.

“Should I serenade?” he asks softly through the door. “I will, too. Embarrassing, sure, but I will. It’s the Gryffindor stupidity, I suppose.”

He says it but knows that Nott is not inside. There’s an empty quality to the silence, all that heavy sadness of his not here at the moment, and it should make breathing that bit easier, but it doesn’t. Not at all.

*

Neville doesn’t find Nott for hours because he’s looking in all the wrong places, checking every cemetery he can think of.

Once he does find Nott, it’s by accident, fate’s ironic little joke on the two (three?) of them. One of the cemeteries, a might as well, Neville pushing through mud and trying to transfigure a clover into a daisy to have something to put on his grandmother’s grave, and suddenly Nott, pale and thin like a moon crescent, drowning in his coat the way Neville’s drowning in relief.

“ _There_ you are,” he says, and wishes he hadn’t left the honeysuckle bouquet at Nott’s doorstep, wishes he had something in his hands besides this pathetic please of all the things he wants. “What— What are you doing here?”

Augusta Longbottom engraved on the tombstone, a loving mother, a loving grandmother, a fighter.

Neville remembers her smoothing out his collar, rubbing chocolate off the corner of his mouth with her thumb, _honestly, Neville._

“Whatever can I be doing here,” Nott muses, and it rings hollow in the almost-night. “It was my father who killed her, alright? You’re so oblivious, you know.”

Nott of all people calling him oblivious, and Neville remembers him standing in the middle of Neville’s shop, staring at flowers.

“It… wasn’t,” he says slowly, slips on the mud trying to get to Nott. “They told me— they’d checked—”

You could check, after the war, families gripping for closure like it was on sale, queues, mobs, and paperwork. Neville waited his turn patiently, didn’t need to know who’d killed his grandmother, already knew she was _dead._

“It wasn’t Bellatrix,” Nott tells him. “I mean, I suppose you could say so, since she cast the spell.”

“Well,” Neville says, and longs to bury his fingers in fern leaves, something green, something good, something alive. It was his grandmother who— plants, she told him once, you have to talk to them, Neville. Plants, you have to touch them.

“She only managed to cast it because my father was holding your grandmother still,” Nott says, voice flat. He turns to face Neville, gives a self-deprecating smile.

There’s an old noise rising somewhere in the back of Neville’s head, like a distant beehive, and he’s heard it before, heard it whenever that little door above his shop’s door rang and he was supposed to think _great_ but thought _Merlin, no_ instead.

All those how are yous, all those fireworks, all that—

All that _quiet._

He puts his hand on something for leverage, one of the tombstones, he—

“You’re not your father, are you?” he manages, and Nott stares at him with those not-there eyes.

“Am I not?” he says, tilts his head, pushes his sleeve up, and taps his finger on the Dark Mark on his forearm as if to reflect the tempo of his pulse. “I’m just a squirt of sperm refusing to be himself.”

Neville recoils at the words, at how ugly they are even though Nott has used his Death Eater hands to make all those tiny buildings, to make beauty itself.

“I’m not good, Neville,” Nott goes on. He pushes his sleeve down and shakes his hand out like he wants to get the feeling of the Dark Mark off his fingertips. “I’m just no longer actively bad.”

He apparates before Neville can grasp his coat, and Neville trips, falls to the ground, hugs Augusta Longbottom’s tombstone, and starts sobbing loud enough to drown out the beehive of after-the-war buzzing in his head.

*

“You’re very committed to being stupid, aren’t you?” Draco says, chin in hand. “Here, have a biscuit.”

“Damn it, I don’t want a biscuit—”

“The mouth on him! Harry, have you heard? Neville’s _upset_. Is he going to cry, I wonder.”

“Is it true, that thing he said?”

“How should _I_ know? Though really, why would he lie?”

“Well, you Slytherins—”

“Oh, come off it! And for a Slytherin, Nott never lied that much anyway, no? He even looks at people honest, doesn’t he? Yeah, I thought you’d agree— Hey where are you— Longbottom!”

*

When Neville first decided to open the shop, he liked brushing dust off things, liked getting splinters in his fingers, liked making the place clean without using magic.

He liked ordering the first flowers, too, and that interview—

Maybe it had been a metaphor for recovery, after all, the whole bloody shop. A lousy one, though, people coming in for flowers for their mothers, girlfriends, friends, sure, but about half of them coming in, like Nott, for flowers to take to some grave.

It’s something he’d overheard on Diagon Alley once, mom, mom, it’s so crowded here, is here where _all_ the wizards are? And the mother brushing dirt off her coat—

All the wizards are in the ground, hon.

It was hard, after overhearing that, to think of life as anything other than a sort of a juggle where you got handed a few people to love to start off and then had to manage not to drop them one by one, where you dropped them anyway.

When Neville knocks on Nott’s door this time, there’s no answer either, but the door is unlocked. He locks it behind himself (just in case, and he’s been locking his own door ever since— always, no exception), toes off his shoes, lines them up next to Nott's own, and makes his way down the hall.

No Nott in the living room but a green vase on the coffee table, the honeysuckle bouquet in it.

“Hello?”

Nothing.

Neville kneels next to the pool, fishes out a building, fishes out a statue. Someone who’d spent long hours taking care to carve little buttons in stone, calling himself—

He finds Nott in the bathroom. He’s sitting in the tub, knees drawn to his chest, water near sloshing over the brim. He’s staring off into nothing, cradling the figurine of Neville in his hand, small stone Nagini bumping into his knee.

Neville stands there, and considers turning around and walking right out, he really does. He can see the rest of his life already, over for tea at Harry’s every week, making his way back to a tentative friendship with Luna and maybe she’d give him a dreamcatcher, trying to smile at customers because he wants to rather than because he should and failing.

It wouldn’t be so bad, that life, Tuesdays and Thursdays at St. Mungo’s, alone.

Always alone.

He sighs.

“What am I going to do with you?” he says, tilting his head at Nott. Nott still won’t look at him but he hugs his knees with his arms and sighs, a weary sound.

“You don’t have to do anything with me, Neville,” he says patiently. “That’s the whole point.”

“Mmm,” Neville says, and closes the door. “I want to, though.”

He takes off his coat, lets it crumple to the ground. He peels off his socks, too, and then he’s telling Nott to scoot over and stepping into the lukewarm water. It’s a tight squeeze once he sits down facing Nott, water sloshing over the edge and wetting Neville’s coat anyway but he smiles, doesn’t mind.

“You’re very stubborn,” Nott says, finally, finally turning his head to look at him and Merlin, those eyes— Neville has never seen anything this sad before. He thinks that war didn’t end after all, just went to live in Nott’s pupils, curled up to sleep in there.

“You are, too,” Neville says, smiles. “My grandmother, she wouldn’t hate you, you know. She would have told you to stop slouching, and she would have told you to brush your hair and ‘honestly, Theodore, would it kill you to smile?’ but she wouldn’t hate you.”

“You don’t know that,” Nott says, and Neville sighs, impatient, and reaches for Nott’s cold hand.

“I _do_ know that. I _do._ ”

“You’re making the mistake of thinking I can be functional,” Nott tells him but doesn’t snatch his hand away, just stares at their entangled fingers, baffled, like he’s never seen anything quite like it before.

“No,” Neville says, and maybe he should be frustrated, but what he’s feeling is more like nervous anticipation, like a can we laugh, finally, a can we laugh already? “I’m only making the maybe-mistake of thinking it wouldn’t be the end of the world if we were dysfunctional together.”

Nott stares at him in silence for a moment and then shakes his head in disbelief.

“You must be crazy,” he says with almost childlike wonder, and Neville imagines what it would be like to hear his voice in his ear during nights so quiet and empty that sound means touch.

“Yes,” Neville says, and grips Nott’s collar. “Yes, exactly.”

They lean close, and they don’t kiss. There’s only the loud sloshing of water, and the sound of Nott’s eyelashes as he blinks when the very tips of their noses touch, and Neville doesn’t even know Nott yet, not really but – and of that he’s certain – he will.

*

It’s like this:

Sometimes Nott yells at people that are not there.

It’s like this:

Sometimes Neville yells at himself.

It’s like this:

He doesn’t die every time that little bell above the shop door rings anymore.

*

And it’s like this:

Trains, buses, Muggle tickets in coat pockets, no coats, too warm for coats, the sun gold enough for them to know that it’s alright to laugh already after all.

Blue water stretched wide, and the sunken city of Baiae, their first stop.

No Atlantis, but all those wonders anyway.

All those wonders and still, wars.

No war now, and look.

After this, there will be Heracleion, and Kekova, and Neapolis.

After this, they will know each other, and there will be love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is it, the most spontaneous thing I've ever written. Anyway, this is technically over but I'll definitely write a oneshot about Drarry getting together and Draco being obsessed with windmills because reasons. And I might be tempted to add something to the main story itself but who knows? The last chapter was meant to be longer but to be honest, this was meant to be more the beginning of a love story than a proper love story, if that makes sense :,)
> 
> Anyway, you can find me on tumblr @ **yoyointhegarden** (though my account there is very chaotic) and if you're bored and like stories about art theft and boarding school friendships, here's a link to my very gay and very dramatic original story: **https://archiveofourown.org/works/23463895/chapters/56249917**
> 
> Thank you so much for reading and please let me know what you think <333


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